Our July Challenge at the B'Sue Creative Group on FB was "The Song Is You". Take a piece of music that inspires you and create a piece of jewelry around that song. We were all posting *great* songs and someone chose the B-52s song, "Roam". Bingo! I love this song, this video and this band sooo much and had the perfect application in mind to turn this tune into jewelry.

Go back about a year when I was playing with corks. I also saw tons of posts of folks making resin spoons. I love green design, so using discarded corks or repurposing an old unwanted item into something useful or beautiful really appeals to me. Enter the lowly souvenir spoon. I've never been a spoon collector personally; they didn't make sense to me. A spoon? From Niagra Falls? Umm... why? But I saw these cool spoon pendants and thought they looked fun to try. I also didn't want a gravy ladle hanging around my neck, so souvenir spoons fit the bill for scale and proportion.

As luck would have it, my local St. Vincent de Paul was having a half-price sale just about the time of my spoon fixation. So that Saturday, I wait in line with nothing in hand and when it's my turn to check out, I ask for every spoon in their display case. There were about 60. The folks in line started asking me what I was going to do with them and I got several thumbs up & "You go, girl! " :D

I walked out with this:

After I got home, I started to really look at them and they were lovely! Some had pierced ends with little charms dangling, some were hand painted, most were just fun, colorful and kitschy. I set about cutting off the bowls from the plain ones and started to play with images.

Images courtesy of an old TCM catalog and the New Yorker. :D

Here are a few of the finished spoon pendants.

So, those were fun to make, but like so many creative folks, I get bored easily. I was on to the next project and barely made a dent in all those lovely spoons. I plan to pull them out soon and make tons more resin pendants. But here's the deal. I had all these wonderful spoon tops that were just begging for something to be done.

When I heard "Roam", I knew I had to break out those lovelies and make something wonderful. So, a little elbow grease, a little Dremel work, a lot of screw hole punching, I came away with a charm bracelet! Oh! And another song inspiration - "I've Been Everywhere" by Johnny Cash! I like the frenetic pace of this song and it pairs nicely with all these places on the bracelet piling on top of one another. :D

I love this bracelet and I don't think I'll be able to part with it. Except for Nebraska, New Jersey and a few other obscure places, I've been to all these places. Kismet!